As outraged residents of Ferguson, Missouri continue to protest a police shooting that left unarmed African-American teenager
Michael Brown dead, Ron Davis — the father of another slain black teen in Jacksonville, Florida — is aiming to shame the United States before the United Nations for what he says are murders committed with impunity against young black men.
Davis' bid comes amid efforts back in Ferguson to build a more-than-a-century-old civil rights movement in response to Brown's killing that community leaders say never took hold in the Greater St. Louis area.
At the 85th meeting of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday and Thursday, Davis hopes to pressure Washington to bolster efforts to stop the phenomenon of what he and the United States Human Rights Network (USHRN), the NGO backing him, call “the criminalization of race” in America.
Ron Davis hopes to direct his anger over the deaths into a solution for African-American fathers who’ve come to teach their children to accept police brutality as a fact of life in the United States. But with no foreseeable plan to address wholesale bloodshed and destruction in Gaza, Syria and Iraq, Davis and USHRN director Ejim Dike hope that taking U.S. rage issues to the international community will create political leverage in Washington.
"We have a lot of people directly impacted by the violence. We have exhausted our domestic remedies. We have to take this to the United Nations. We have to see if we can leverage that pressure to see if we can get people to act on this issue,” Dike said.
“Talking about any issue as a human rights violation gets the attention of the U.S. government. It's embarrassing for the government that champions itself as a beacon of human rights in the world,” Dike added.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/12/ferguson-shootinggeneva.html